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Feb. 28, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:29
For The Democrats, The Crazies Are The Captain Now
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Well, the Michigan primaries were last night, and there's some interesting stories on both sides of the aisle.
The bigger story, of course, is on the Democratic side of the aisle, where the incumbent president of the United States only won about 80% of the vote.
Now, that sounds like a lot, except for the fact that a huge number of people in Michigan voted uncommitted.
That was a concerted attempt by crazies in the Democratic Party in Michigan, particularly crazies who support Hamas, many of them in Dearborn, Michigan, who decided that they were going to show Joe Biden that unless he swivels his support from Israel to Hamas, he is somehow going to lose Michigan to Donald Trump.
And this raises a serious question.
Why is Joe Biden so dependent on the crazies in his own party?
After all, Joe Biden came into office running against the crazies in his own party.
You'll recall, if you go all the way back to the 2020 primaries, that he was running against a crazy person, Bernie Sanders, who's a nutjob old socialist, And then Joe Biden made a signal error.
He decided that he was going to be LBJ.
because Jim Clyburn in South Carolina endorsed Joe Biden and the entire Democratic Party unified
to stop Bernie Sanders, the crazy guy, that Joe Biden ended up winning the nomination
and then defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
And then Joe Biden made a signal error.
He decided that he was going to be LBJ.
He was going to be FDR, not a placeholder for the next generation of Democrats,
but he was going to be a transformative president.
And if you're on the left, being a transformative president means spending more money than God or man has ever seen.
If you're on the left, then being a transformative president means embracing all of the most woke versions of politics ranging from diversity, equity, and inclusion to trans politics.
You have to embrace the most radical possible position.
...and drag the American public along with you.
It also means on the foreign policy front, the realities of foreign policy exist for every president, which is why virtually every president talks one way when they're on the campaign trail, and then they get into office and they realize the way the world actually works, and they swivel how they actually govern.
George W. Bush came into office pledging to be an isolationist and then 9-11 happened.
Barack Obama came into office pledging to be an isolationist and then he involved us in a bunch of Middle Eastern conflict.
Donald Trump came into office pledging to be an isolationist and then he brokered the Abraham Accords and took pretty harsh stances against Russia and China.
Joe Biden came into office pledging that he was going to get out of Afghanistan and make America less involved in the world.
And now there are two major ongoing wars in the world in which the United States has indirect involvement.
So in other words, Joe Biden never really had the opportunity to be full on left wing when it came to foreign policy, because being the president of the United States basically forestalls that.
His one attempt at doing that, which was the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, cratered his presidency.
If you look at his approval ratings throughout his presidency, Joe Biden's approval ratings dramatically sank in the aftermath of the Afghanistan pullout, and they have never recovered.
They've remained in the low 40s ever since.
All of which means that if Joe Biden had come into office and then governed as he pledged he was going to govern, as a left-wing moderate, a liberal moderate, Somebody who sought consensus.
Somebody who is just going to restore a sense of normalcy and moderation to American politics.
He would not now be in the dire straits that he is.
Moderates have fallen off the bandwagon.
Independents are now looking at Trump.
And by the polling data, a plurality of independents favor Donald Trump over Joe Biden right now, which is why Donald Trump is up in the polling against Joe Biden.
How Joe Biden loses independence to Donald Trump is an amazing story.
Because again, independents are very off-put by Donald Trump on a personal level.
They voted against him in 2020.
Late-breaking independent voters in 2016 voted 2-1 for Donald Trump.
In 2020, late-breaking independent voters voted 2-1 for Joe Biden, and now they're shifting back to Trump.
There's only one reason for that, and that is that Joe Biden allowed his ambitions to be a historic president that they would make statues of to overcome his good political sense.
He didn't want to be a Clintonian third-way president.
He wanted to be like Barack Obama.
He wanted to be somebody who people thought of for generations to come as a transformative president in American history.
And because of that, he has now alienated the actual base that he wants held.
And that base is now looking much more seriously at President Trump as his rival.
And that means that he is in thrall to the crazies.
And that is the story of what happened in Michigan last night.
Again, when you look at these statistics, what you see is that Joe Biden won approximately
618,000 votes.
First of all, that's a very large number of votes for an incumbent president in a primary.
If you go back to like 2012 and you look at the Michigan primary in 2012 for the Democrats,
what you will see is that Barack Obama in the Michigan primaries in 2012, when he was
the incumbent president, which would be the same position as Joe Biden right now, he only
In other words, no one showed up to vote in those primaries.
Why did no one show up to vote in the primaries?
Because everybody kind of was like, eh, whatever, who cares?
He's going to be the nominee.
Why am I even bothering to show up?
But for Joe Biden, a lot of people showed up.
618,000 people showed up to vote for Joe Biden.
But the bigger story, of course, is that 101,000 people showed up and voted uncommitted.
And there was an overt attempt, again, by the crazies in Michigan, led by people like Rashida Tlaib.
To jack up the number of people who voted uncommitted.
Another 23,000 voted for Marianne Williamson.
Another 20,000 voted for Dean Phillips.
So Joe Biden ends up winning about 81% of the vote total in Michigan.
But again, that big story is going to be the uncommitted voters because the idea is that if those uncommitted voters decide not to vote for Joe Biden in the actual election in November, then you could very well lose the state.
Now he won that state by about 150,000 votes last time.
100,000 is a lot of votes.
Are all those people going to vote actively against Joe Biden?
Probably not.
But say half of those people decide that they are not going to show up to the polls for Joe Biden because they're unhappy with Joe Biden.
Well, that means that he's in real trouble in Michigan.
Which means again, when you steer away from middle, that means you are more reliant on your remaining voting base.
And his remaining voting base is full of crazy people.
And that is why you are seeing Joe Biden constantly embracing crazy unpopular positions.
I mean, the reality is that the polling data suggests that when it comes to, for example, the Israel-Hamas conflict, the American people are broadly supportive of Israel.
The latest Harvard-Harris poll shows that 82% of Americans say they support Israel more than Hamas.
All the Hamas voters are in the Democratic Party.
68% of Americans say that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties in fighting its war with Hamas.
So in other words, there's pretty heavy support.
America remains a very pro-Israel country, but not inside the crazy wing of the Democratic Party.
And that's the part that Joe Biden has made himself totally dependent upon.
And we should understand that that Democratic Party, the crazies in the Democratic Party, they don't even know they're crazy.
That is the thing to understand about crazy people in general.
Crazy people in general do not know that they are crazy.
They think that they are perfectly sane and you are crazy.
These folks are nuts.
And they can't even tell that they are nuts.
They deny the level of the nuttiness.
Joe Biden does too.
Joe Biden pretends this is all normal politics as usual.
It is not.
It is not normal politics as usual to have 100,000 people vote against you because you side against an actual genocidal terrorist group.
That is wild.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, Uncommitted blew past their original target of 10,000 voters and clocked in at a figure substantially higher on Tuesday than it has been in recent Michigan primaries.
And they have now tallied about 13% of the entire tally.
By comparison, uncommitted drew about 11% of the vote in the 2012 Michigan Democratic primary won by President Barack Obama.
But again, the numbers were way lower in 2012.
David Axelrod, who's a former senior advisor to Obama, said Michigan is going to be a marginal state this fall.
If the voters who registered their protest walk away this fall, it could be decisive.
He says, this was a cost-free vote.
This is a good point to make.
In the fall, it will be a choice of much greater consequence.
In other words, if you don't vote or if you vote uncommitted in the actual election, then all those voters in Dearborn, what, are they going to vote for Trump, the most pro-Israel president in American history?
Good luck with that.
But again, this goes to the broader point.
Joe Biden has put himself in thrall to the radicals, and the radicals have him by the short hairs, which is why the New York Times has an entire piece today titled, Young Voters Say Their Discontent Goes Deeper Than Israel and Gaza.
The energy on Michigan college campuses ahead of the 2022 midterms, students said, was electric.
Armed with promises to protect abortion rights, Democratic candidates held large campus rallies, drawing crowds who came prepared to cheer rather than to protest.
On Election Day, students showed up in droves, but before, The Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, the energy seems to have morphed into apathy or anger.
Young activists have been at the forefront of sustained backlash to President Biden's staunch support of Israel and its military campaign in Gaza.
Interviews with more than two dozen students across the state indicated a deeper well of dissatisfaction, not just with the incumbent president, but the prospect of once again having to choose between Biden and Trump, people decades older than they are.
Voters under 30 who backed Biden by more than 20 points in 2020 are unenthusiastic about a rematch.
Voters under 30 overwhelmingly voiced their opposition to the conflict in a New York Times Siena College poll saying Israel had not done enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza and the military campaign should stop.
Again, when you make your entire campaign dependent on the low propensity voters in the youth vote, When you make your entire campaign dependent on people who are not only low propensity but radical, that of course is going to shape the rest of your campaign.
And you have only one choice at that point, and that is to steer into the radicalism.
Joe Biden is so dependent on the crazies in his base that he has to steer in that direction.
It explains everything that he is doing right now.
And the radicals know it, which is why you have pieces like the one in Politico today about the Michigan lawmaker, the Democratic floor leader of the Michigan House of Representatives, a man named Abraham Ayesh, who is denouncing Joe Biden.
He said he stood with no spine and did not demand peace for Palestinians, did not demand peace for Israelis, and instead continues to fund a genocide.
He is now 30, and he is the first Arab-American House Majority Leader in the history of the state of Michigan.
Which, again, kudos to the Michigan State Republican Party for being completely incompetent at their jobs.
Really well done.
But this is the narrative that the media have been pushing and they're going to continue to push it.
Now, Joe Biden does have another strategy.
He could navigate away from the crazies.
In other words, Joe Biden could take a moderate position on everything from, say, the border, to abortion, from spending, To Israel.
He could take the moderate mainstream position.
The 80% position.
But we have moved out of the realm of normal politics in this country.
We really have.
It used to be that the best way to win an election was to take a bunch of 80% positions.
Find the 80% positions.
Things where Americans were 80% pro the position and then you do that.
But instead, we have now decided to abandon those in favor of 43% propositions and then hope that there are enough people in that 43% who are gonna vote to outweigh the people on the other side who presumably are unenthusiastic or not going to vote.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
And make no mistake, these folks are legitimately quite crazy.
So, for example, Cornel West, who is on the left of the Democratic Party,
and he's running as an independent, but of course, he is a far leftist and is quite
representative of some of the crazies in the Democratic Party.
Cornel West spent his day yesterday suggesting a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
These are the people Joe Biden is going to try to pander to.
You can see his policy already shifting.
Do you believe in the idea of eradicating a terrorist group like Hamas,
which did such barbaric things to innocent civilians?
Well, one, I mean, you and I know that a Jewish life has exactly the same value as a Palestinian
A Palestinian baby has the same value as a Jewish baby.
The question is, how do you get at the roots of it?
Anytime you kill an innocent person, that is a crime against humanity.
Did Hamas commit war crimes?
Absolutely!
Murder is murder.
Now, I believe in just war.
Combatants can kill combatants.
I'm not like Martin Luther King.
I'm not a pacifist.
But combatants must not kill civilians or innocent people, no matter who it is, IDF or Hamas.
But the problem is, if you're going to call Hamas a terrorist group and the IDF is killing innocent people, they're terrorists too.
Okay, Cornel West is an absolute clown, but again, representative of a huge clown base inside the Democratic Party.
It's an amazing thing.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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By the way, if you really want to know the extent to which the radicals in the Democratic Party are in control,
look at James Carville.
So James Carville, this is the part that's amazing.
The Moderates in the Democratic Party have decided they need to cave to the Radicals.
So James Carville is one of the more moderate members of the Democratic Party, right?
He is the designer of the Clintonian Third Way.
He and Dick Morris were the people who basically designed triangulation.
James Carville has been the person who's been on the ramparts in the Democratic Party saying you need to stop talking about men in women's bathrooms and you need to start talking about, say, economic issues.
But here he is basically acknowledging that the crazies now run the party.
He says that if we get to Chicago, the Democratic Convention, which is going to happen in Chicago this year, again, I gotta say, just amazing writing this year of Trump, where you have the Democrats going back to Chicago for the convention, the same place that the 1968 convention took place, in which you had a hotly contested Democratic primary fight, the assassination of a major political figure in RFK, in which you had massive riots over the Vietnam War,
That's where they chose to have their convention this year.
Just really well done.
So here's James Carville saying that if we get to the Chicago convention, and the Gaza war is still continuing, then it's gonna get wild.
You know, Diane was talking about this uncommitted vote in Michigan because of the war in Gaza.
There are some Democratic activists who are saying they want to see Democrats vote uncommitted instead of for President Biden.
What do you think about the concerns about that?
Are they well-founded?
Is this being blown out of proportion?
What do you think?
Well, first of all, congratulations on your new show.
I'm honored to be a part of it.
Thanks, James.
I think this issue is deep.
And I think it's a lot deeper than just progressive advocates or young people or college campuses.
I hope the president can get some kind of ceasefire and take this off the front burner because, frankly, it's damaged politically.
It's pretty substantial.
And if we get to Chicago at the convention and this thing is still going on, I don't want to think about what's going to happen there.
Okay, now understand that when James Carville is caving to the radicals, that shows you that they have to.
He doesn't want to.
They have to.
And then, of course, you have the great minds of the New York Times who also are urging Joe Biden to cave to the radicals.
That, of course, would be morons like Thomas Friedman, legitimately one of the dumbest people in the history of foreign policy commentary.
Thomas Friedman, a man who gets all of his advice from cab drivers in random places.
And this moron is still advising the Biden administration on foreign policy.
He has a piece in the New York Times today titled, quote, Israel is losing its greatest asset, acceptance.
Was that Israel's greatest asset?
I noticed that Israel has another asset and it's called the very powerful military.
If Jews were waiting for acceptance for all of human history, that was a strategy that failed pretty dramatically until Israel actually arose and had, you know, an air force.
I noticed that Thomas Friedman seems to like the Jews having the goodwill of the world up until the point where they defend themselves and start killing terrorists.
He says, quote, I've spent the past few days traveling from New Delhi to Dubai and Amman.
I have an urgent message to deliver to President Biden and the Israeli people.
I'm seeing the increasingly rapid erosion of Israel's standing among friendly nations, a level of acceptance and legitimacy that was painstakingly built up over decades.
And if Biden is not careful, America's global standing will plummet right along with Israel's.
So where exactly is he feeling the legitimacy that you drain away?
He says the legitimacy is draining away in the Arab world.
Oh, shocker!
I can't believe it!
But why is he really doing that?
The reason that he is doing that, Thomas Friedman, is not only because he happens to be wrong on foreign policy literally all the time, but because he knows, and everyone else knows, Joe Biden abandoned the thing that got him to office in the first place.
And now he's in serious trouble, which means that now he's putting pressure on Israel in the middle of a war against a terrorist enemy.
Israel has now reduced Hamas's serious control over the Gaza Strip to the city of Rafah.
It is in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Everyone knows it is a final climactic battle in the Gaza Strip.
And what is Joe Biden doing as Israel is prepared to go in and kill, presumably, Yahya Sinwar, who is the leader of Hamas, the mastermind of the October 7th attacks?
He's telling Israel effectively to back off.
According to Axios, the Biden administration gave Israel until mid-March to sign a letter provided by the U.S.
on Tuesday that gives assurances it will abide by international law while using U.S.
weapons and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Three U.S.
and Israeli officials told Axios, The assurances are now a requirement under a memo issued earlier this month by President Biden.
While it doesn't single out Israel, the new policy came after some Democratic senators expressed concern over the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
If the assurances aren't provided by the deadline, U.S.
weapons transfers to the country will be paused.
Now, here is the problem with that idiotic notion.
International law is a chimera.
It is a lie.
International law is largely designed by people who do not abide by it under any circumstances and only apply it to people they seek to hamstring.
International law, in other words, is a joke.
That is never how foreign policy has run.
The Wilsonian notion that there is some sort of great congress of powers that gets together and decides the morality of the world and that international law now applies is silliness.
It has always been silliness.
And yet that is what Joe Biden is now pushing.
And why is he doing that?
He's doing that because he wants the votes in Michigan.
That's all.
It's very simple.
The memorandum was issued by the White House after pressure from Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.
Three U.S.
officials told Axios that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told the White House that he was concerned an amendment would divide the Democratic caucus in the Senate.
And so what did Schumer do?
Instead of standing up to his own crazies, he told Joe Biden to just do it as an executive action.
Again, not a shock at all.
This is what the Democratic Party is now.
So, is Joe Biden, are the Democrats likely to placate the crazies?
The answer is no, because they're crazy.
This is the problem.
Once you are enthralled to the crazies, everything runs out of control pretty quickly.
So who are the people who are voting uncommitted in Michigan?
Well, they're probably people like the people that we saw last night over at Berkeley.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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So over at UC Berkeley, there was, as per our usual arrangement, a massive protest that turned into a riot.
It was a private event, and Jewish students were threatened, assaulted, and prevented from attending the speech by a Jewish speaker on campus.
Students were called derogatory names like Dirty Jew or You Jew.
Here is some tape of what was going on at Berkeley.
they'd cancel the event and evacuate the hall.
And that's what we're doing.
We have the Jewish student trying to go to one of our events.
Protesters who are blocking Jewish students from entering the event.
Shame! Shame on all of you!
This is what they do.
These are the people that Joe Biden is catering to.
Precisely the group that Joe Biden is catering to.
College-aged students who hate Jews.
Those are the people that Joe Biden is very, very hot on getting.
And what's amazing about all this, again, is that by and large, Americans support Israel against Hamas.
If Joe Biden had shown one iota of actual credible leadership, rather than trying to have the baby to placate the nuts, Then he would be more popular on this issue.
You know what Americans like?
They like when American allies actually win wars.
You know what they don't like?
When American allies lose wars.
You know how we know that?
Because Joe Biden lost a war in Afghanistan and it tanked him.
Joe Biden's failure to secure anything approaching victory in Ukraine.
Joe Biden's failure to secure anything approaching victory with regard to Israel and Hamas is a bad thing for him politically.
Because if you decide, that is a shrinking base of nuts.
And he wants the nuts.
What's amazing about that is that, of course, puts the nuts in the driver's seat.
And let's be very clear.
Joe Biden has now done that.
Internationally, not only domestically.
Because you know who knows they're in control now.
Hamas.
So Joe Biden, the other day, he made a claim that a ceasefire was mere moments away.
He was eating ice cream.
And he made the claim that a ceasefire was about to happen.
All would be well.
And then Hamas was like, nope.
And the reason Hamas said no is because they know that they can jack Joe Biden around.
The more intransigent Hamas is, the more they make demands that are not fulfilled, the more pressure Biden will exert on Israel, not on Hamas.
And no point does Joe Biden ever say to Hamas, OK, guys, you know what?
We tried to make a deal.
The deal is not forthcoming.
Israel have at it.
At no point did Joe Biden say that, because he's afraid that if he does that under any circumstances, he loses Michigan.
So he has now handed the baton to the terrorist group in a variety of ways.
As we've discussed over the last couple of days, for example, the Palestinian government, not the head of the government, Mahmoud Abbas, the dictator, but the rest of the Palestinian elected government, I say elected because they're not elected, government resigned to make way for a Hamas-led government.
And then Joe Biden is going to tap that government on the head and call it the new Palestinian government.
New boss, same as the old boss, except worse in the West Bank.
And now, Hamas officials say on Tuesday there was no breakthrough in the mediated talks with Israel aimed at pausing the war and freeing the remaining hostages in the Gaza Strip that came one day after Joe Biden said that a ceasefire was imminent.
Bassem Naim, a Hamas spokesperson, said in a text message the militant group had yet to formally receive any new proposals since senior Israeli officials met with Qatar, Egypt, and U.S.
in Paris last week to advance a possible deal.
Another Hamas official, Ahmad Abdel-Hadi, said the group was sticking to its demand that Israel agree to a long-term ceasefire and that leaks about the talks were designed to pressure Hamas to soften its position.
By long-term ceasefire, they mean leaving Hamas in place, which is the only thing Hamas needs in order to declare victory.
Understand that in a normal traditional war, when you degrade the enemy's military capacity the way that Israel has done Hamas, and Hamas does not have offensive projective capacity at this point, that would normally be considered a win.
That's not the way that it works in the Middle East.
In the Middle East, the way that it works is if you provoke a war and you get your ass absolutely kicked, but you survive and you wave your flag, you are somehow the victor.
That is the way this idiotic regime works in the Middle East.
And Hamas knows that.
So all they're looking to do at this point is survive.
How crazy are the crazies?
They're so crazy that the moderates among the crazies are still crazy.
So for example, there was a tweet that was going around yesterday.
Everybody was laughing at it, but it does demonstrate the sort of standards
that proponents of Hamas and the Palestinians more broadly, It does demonstrate how nuts a lot of these folks are.
There is a person, his name is Mohamed Elkurd.
He's a Palestinian writer and poet.
And he lives in East Jerusalem.
He was born in East Jerusalem.
He, uh, and he apparently graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and he, uh, studies poetry at Brooklyn College as well.
He's a correspondent for The Nation.
So, you know, a well-respected member of the pro-Palestinian left, obviously.
So, he, um, he gave a speech not all that long ago in which he claimed that Quote, our day will come, but we must not be complacent.
Our day will come, but we must normalize massacres as the status quo.
Talking about October 7th.
Well, the other day, he tweeted out this.
Quote, you can't protest peacefully.
You can't boycott.
You can't hunger strike.
You can't hijack planes.
You can't block traffic.
You can't throw molotovs.
You can't self immolate.
You can't heckle politicians.
You can't march.
You can't riot.
You can't dissent.
You just can't be.
And that tells the whole stories of the crazies that Joe Biden has turned his party over to.
Not that Mohammed Al-Kurd is an American citizen who can vote, but his allies in the United States can.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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And I just want to analyze this for a moment because it tells the whole story of the Arab-Israeli conflict in like one tweet.
His version of just being, okay?
His version of leave us alone.
Leave us alone is a pretty well-respected argument that is made by people on all sides of various political aisles.
Leave us alone is a pretty good argument, right?
Leave me alone.
I'm not bothering you.
Leave me alone.
But his version of leave us alone, right?
Leave me be is Blocking traffic, throwing Molotov cocktails, self-immolating, and hijacking planes.
Right?
I mean, that's a crazy statement!
You can't just let us be.
It's so difficult when you won't let us hijack planes.
It's so hard when you won't let us throw Molotov cocktails or set ourselves on fire.
These are the people that Joe Biden has hitched his boat to.
Good luck to him.
By the way, things are gonna get worse before they get better because of all of this.
The great lie in the Middle East is that when you broker these temporary hudnas, these temporary ceasefires, that this somehow calms the waters in the Middle East.
That is wrong.
The only thing that matters, as always, is victory.
The only thing that matters is power and control.
That's all that matters in this region of the world.
There is no baseline agreement on values.
That means that if Hamas survives, Hamas is therefore strengthened.
Hezbollah is strengthened.
And by the way, just to note the double standard here, it truly is amazing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the start of Ramadan looms as an informal but urgent deadline to strike an Israel-Hamas ceasefire, as the militant group called Wednesday for mass protests during Islamic holy month that Israel fears is part of a plan to spread the conflict outside of Gaza.
Israeli leaders have said they would launch an offensive against Hamas' last stronghold in Gaza if a deal is not reached by Ramadan, set to start around March 10.
The US, Egypt, and Qatar have warned Israel against a ground offensive in Rafah as it could endanger negotiations.
Negotiations, by the way, Hamas is totally playing for all they are worth.
On Wednesday, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas's political bureau from his five-star hotel in Qatar, called on Palestinians outside Gaza to converge on Al-Aqsa Mosque.
This is the routine that happens pretty much every year around Ramadan, in which Muslims are allowed to gather en masse at Al-Aqsa, and then they start hurling molotov cocktails and rocks at Israeli soldiers, and then when Israeli soldiers quash it, they suggest that it's some form of a brutal occupation and evil army action to stop them from worshiping on the Temple Mount.
Which, as a multiple-time visitor to the Temple Mount, there are only restrictions on me as a Jew.
There are no restrictions on Muslims who are worshiping at Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Zero.
If you go there to worship, you're fine.
If I go up on the Temple Mount and I openly pray, I will be expelled from the Temple Mount.
That is the way that it works up there.
Christians, too, by the way.
But the truth doesn't matter in this region of the world.
All that matters is power.
And again, the amazing thing here is that look at...
The West can't even comprehend.
They can't.
The West has now allied itself for PR purposes with groups like Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
Because once you try to broker a deal and you legitimize one of the sides of the deal that is a terrorist group as a legitimate side of the deal, you now become their proponent.
This is exactly what happened with Barack Obama in Iran.
He signed a terrible Iran deal and then he had to spend the rest of his administration running cover for the Iranians.
Because if he had acknowledged the Iranians were lying and sponsoring terror everywhere, then it would have looked like he was a sucker.
He had sunk cost fallacy about his own Iran deal.
And the same thing is happening here with regard to these negotiations.
The United States is like, let's do negotiations with Hamas.
And Hamas is like, all right, let's do it.
And then they're doing whatever they want to do.
And the US is like, well, we do want them part of the negotiations.
Joe Biden's like, well, we do want them as part of the negotiation.
And that means we have to treat their demands reasonably.
Meanwhile, they're literally looking to weapon up for their holiday.
Now I just have a question for all the Christians, Jews, non-Muslims in the audience, and moderate Muslims in the audience, by the way.
Why would your holiday be the occasion of launching a vast terror attack slash war?
It is amazing the double standard here.
If you're a radical Muslim, not only can you use your own mosque as a shield for your weaponry, which routinely happens, Not only can you use your own holiday as a shield.
Oh my God, you can't attack us on Ramadan.
It's very holy to us.
Also, we're going to kill you because it's Ramadan and now it's our time.
These are radical Muslim propositions.
But also, when you guys have a holiday, that's the best time to attack.
Again, October 7th, which is on the Jewish calendar, probably the happiest day of the year.
And that was the perfect time for Hamas to rush across the border and slaughter 1,200 people.
Joe Biden has wedded himself to this, and he has done this because he refuses to moderate on any issue.
His vision outweighed his capacity.
He wanted to be transformative, and he has been alright.
And once you are dancing with the devil, that dance just gets faster and faster.
And it's not just, by the way, with regard to Israel and Hamas, although that's the most clear-cut example because of what's happening in Michigan.
It's also with regard to the border.
The obvious question on the border.
Why won't Joe Biden shut the border?
Everyone wants him to.
By polling data, Joe Biden needs to close the border.
He needs to take harsh action on the border.
Donald Trump is destroying him on this issue in all polling data.
It has now jumped to the top of the heap among issues that Americans actually care about.
And still, Joe Biden is dithering and doing nothing.
Why?
Seriously, why?
And the only possible reason is because he is enthralled to his crazies.
He's enthralled to the nut jobs.
So for example, Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday, she said Joe Biden is heading down to the border.
She was asked, so is he going to announce any executive action or anything to, you know, stop the giant flow of illegal immigration?
I think nope.
Actually, no.
We've spoken to executive actions, I've spoken to that many times.
We think the bottom line is the way to have dealt with this border, the challenge that we see at the border, what we see with this immigration, a broken immigration system that has been broken for decades.
Okay, so no.
That's a no.
They're not going to do anything about any of this.
Meanwhile, by the way, the bodies are stacking up.
Bill Malugan, who does an excellent job reporting on these issues, Over the past 24 hours, he's just been reporting crime after crime.
So, for example, local media in Washington, D.C.
reporting a Salvadoran illegal immigrant has been arrested in connection with the murder of a two-year-old child on February 8th.
ICE says that he was released from custody after arrests multiple times in 2023 after the local jurisdiction ignored ICE detainers.
The two-year-old was caught in the crossfire of a gang war.
That was not the only illegal immigrant serious crime over the course of the last 48 hours to pop into the news.
According to Fox 8 Live, a 19-year-old Honduran man has been arrested in Kenner, Louisiana, following a series of violent crimes, according to police.
The Kenner Police Department says the investigation began Tuesday, February 20th, when it was notified of the rape of a 14-year-old girl at Knife Point.
The suspect was then identified as an immigrant, a Honduran, in the United States illegally.
Apparently, police say a man was getting out of his vehicle and was approached by this person and demanding his property.
During the robbery, police say that the perpetrator stabbed the victim multiple times in the face and the back.
Officers of the scene found this illegal immigrant covered in blood.
The chief of police says undocumented immigrants are difficult to identify due to lack of documentation.
This person had reportedly used aliases in the past, including Elvin Lockett.
Then, according to Chief Jason Owens, who is the 26th Chief of U.S.
U.S. Border Patrol, quote, in the last 72 hours, U.S.
Border Patrol agents throughout the Southwest border region have apprehended 11 individuals
with violent criminal histories.
Their criminal histories include child molestation, aggravated assault, rape, murder and manufacture
and trafficking of firearms.
And Joe Biden still won't close the border.
He still won't close the border.
There's only one reason for that, and that is because, again, once more, once you have a band in the middle, you have to attack to the extremes.
Joe Biden has made that decision, and now we are all reaping the whirlwind from that.
In just one second, we'll get to Democratic politicians who don't actually want to reap that whirlwind particularly.
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Okay, meanwhile.
Okay, there are Democrats who do not wish to go down with the sinking radical ship.
That apparently includes Eric Adams.
Eric Adams ran again on a more moderate platform as mayor of New York.
Now he is saying that he wants to deport migrants accused of serious crimes.
Now, you might think that that would be like a normal proposition.
Wrong!
The Democratic City Council is trying to oppose him.
According to the New York Times, for years, New York City leaders have relished the status of being a so-called sanctuary city where local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration officials is limited.
On Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams made it clear his views were different.
If he had his way, he said he would permit law enforcement in New York City to work openly with immigration authorities to more readily deport migrants who are suspected of serious crimes.
There's some people that feel they should be able to remain here, keep their actions, until they're eventually convicted, he said.
I don't subscribe to that theory.
A reporter asked Adams about due process.
He said they didn't give due process to the person they shot or punched or killed.
There's a philosophical disagreement here.
The city council says there are no plans to revisit these laws.
Again, that divide is the Democratic Party in a nutshell, which is why the Democratic Party is, in fact, in a process of shrinking away.
Now, the Democratic Party has also yet to take advantage of positions on which the Republican Party is not in the 80%.
So, take the situation with regard to Ukraine.
So, the United States has a bunch of conflicting data on what Americans think of funding for Ukraine.
According to a recent YouGov poll, in the United States, The 43% of Americans believe that the West should continue to support Ukraine in its efforts against Russia until such a time as Russia withdraws from the country, even if that means the war and its effects last longer.
Some 23% of Americans say they want to encourage a negotiated peace to end the fighting, even if it means Russia still has control over some parts of Ukraine.
So a plurality of Americans still believe that funding for Ukraine would be the proper way to do this.
And when it comes to whether the West is doing enough to prevent the Russians from winning in Ukraine, the United States, 46% of Americans say that we're not doing enough.
25% say that we are doing more than enough or enough.
And this is a YouGov poll from January.
As far as the level of aid being sent to Ukraine, 33% of the American public believes that we should maintain the same levels of support to Ukraine.
Some 26% believe that we should reduce our level of support.
Some 23% believe we should increase our levels of support.
So one of the big questions when it comes to funding for Ukraine is whether the reduced position is read as status quo or whether the increased position is read as status quo.
Because generally Americans kind of like status quo.
They're like, okay, fine.
We'll just keep spending what we've been spending.
We don't want to see like a radical uptick in the amount of spending.
But only 26% of Americans are expressing that they would actually like to reduce our levels of support according to this YouGov poll.
So that is a minority proposition that Americans desperately want to reduce the commitment that has been made to Ukraine.
With that said, there are swing state voters who do believe that we've given too much to Ukraine.
So, a poll from the UK Telegraph, this is from January, early January, finds that in, for example, Michigan, 32% of Americans believe that America has given too much to Ukraine, 21% say too little, 29% say the right amount, 18% say they do not know.
Okay, bottom line though is, the hard and fast opposition to more aid to Ukraine, so long as that aid is not, you know, wildly overdramatic, The vast majority of American voters, or at least the vast plurality, are still in favor of continued aid to Ukraine.
They don't want to just cut off Ukraine at the knees right now.
Which is why it is very strange that Republicans continue to not negotiate over the situation in Ukraine.
Now the Democrats have failed here, signally, to convince the American public that they actually hold the middle ground.
The question on Ukraine is who holds the middle ground.
The middle ground on Ukraine is the one the Americans want.
Most Americans want to provide enough aid to Ukraine to help them withstand the Russian barrage, but not enough aid that it is a serious cost to the United States or we don't want to shore up their bureaucracy or anything like that, which is why there are Republican backbenchers who are now proposing an alternative aid to Ukraine bill, which presumably is pretty popular with the American people.
That is a Ukraine aid bill.
It's being proposed by actually a bipartisan coalition, including Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Jared Golden of Maine and Don Bacon of Nebraska.
It's called the Defending Borders, Defending Democracies Act.
It includes border control measures, including that migrants coming over the southern border have to remain in Mexico, which would be the biggest single policy prescription that was reversed by Joe Biden.
So that in and of itself would be a huge win.
Remain in Mexico being enshrined in law would be a major win for the United States if this bill were to pass the House and the Senate.
And the bill includes $47 billion for Ukraine priorities that is down $13 billion from the proposal approved by the Senate.
The House lawmakers excluded the Senate's $7.8 billion in government budgetary aid to Kiev.
Saying, why are we paying their government expenditures?
We just want to pay for the weaponry so that they can stop the Russians from invading.
The bill would also fund U.S.
military operations in the Red Sea.
It would spend $3 billion on helping America build more submarines.
And it would spend $4 billion refilling Israel's stocks of air defense interceptors.
Which makes sense because if you want to stop Iran from, for example, firing a missile at Israel, Israel needs that aid, presumably.
So, that bill is being proposed by a bipartisan coalition.
The House Speaker Johnson has been unable to bring forward anything.
And herein lies the unworkability of the Republican House, snatching defeat from the jaws of obvious victory.
Again, there are a thousand ways Republicans can win this particular PR battle.
And they seem to be ignoring all of them because, again, the House Speaker is dependent on a single vote.
The House majority is down to low single digits.
And that means that if Speaker Johnson does something to cross, like, four Republicans, he loses his speakership.
Now, maybe at this point, he should just say, okay, fine.
Well, but that's the job.
The job is I pass bills that I think are going to help the Republican party win, say, the next congressional election and help Donald Trump win the presidency.
Because let's be real about this.
Joe Biden is now running against Congress.
That is what he is doing.
For example, yesterday, here was Joe Biden saying that the consequences of an action in Ukraine are dire.
That's a hard case to make if Republicans were passing, say, a $47 billion aid package that includes serious border provisions, as opposed to passing nothing.
He's counting on Republican inaction to help carry him over the finish line.
Again, this is the only place where he can even attempt to grab what he believes to be a moderate middle position, is on Ukraine.
And that's only being made possible because Republicans have not made clear exactly what the hell they want.
They're completely divided.
Here is Joe Biden.
We've got a lot of work to do.
We've got to figure out how we're going to keep funding the government, which is an important problem, an important solution we need to find, and I think we can do that.
And in Ukraine, I think the need is urgent.
I hope we get to speak to that a little bit.
And I think the consequences of inaction every day in Ukraine are dire.
Bottom line here is that at some point the Republican leadership is going to have to stand up for the majority of its actual constituents and take positions that may alienate the more radical parts of the base.
Again, even inside the Republican Party, it is a minority proposition, it still is, to completely cut off aid to Ukraine.
That is still not a, just by polling data, that is not a majority position inside even the Republican Party.
And if Russia were to overrun Kiev, it would look even worse for Republicans, as Joe Biden found out when he let the Taliban overrun Kabul.
So are Republicans going to allow by, again, whoever acts not crazy wins.
Whoever seizes the middle ground in this election cycle wins.
That is presumably why Republicans are also discussing the possibility of averting a government shutdown.
The Speaker Johnson, he said that he's optimistic that we would avert a government shutdown this weekend.
And this is, in fact, the correct political position.
I know that there are a lot of people who like government shutdowns because they believe they achieve something.
I'm only in favor of a shutdown if you get a win out of it.
But it turns out that this shutdown is not likely to achieve anything like the substantive win you need in order to offset the PR catastrophe that would be Joe Biden running against a Congress that is completely dysfunctional.
Here was Johnson yesterday.
The other big priority for our country, of course, is the funding of our government.
And we have been working in good faith around the clock, every single day, for months and weeks, and over the last several days, quite literally around the clock, to get that job done.
We're very optimistic.
I hope that the other leaders came out here and told you the same.
We believe that we can get to agreement on these issues and prevent a government shutdown.
And that's our first responsibility.
Okay, again, it looks as though Johnson will avert the problem when it comes to the government shutdown, because again, why hand Democrats a political victory for minimal gain?
But when it comes to Ukraine, again, that's where Biden is going to run on that.
Republicans have the advantage right now on the border.
They have the advantage on Middle Eastern policy.
They could also have the advantage on Ukraine, if they would simply articulate a policy that makes any sort of sense.
But again, it's too fragmentary in the House, and Biden's own vagueness on policy, and on what he actually seeks there, Is not going to make up for Republican failures when it comes to even passing a thing.
Like, figure out what you want and pass the thing in the House.
That's what the House is for.
Just do that.
Just take another example.
The House had proposed the passage of an Israel aid only bill.
And Joe Biden threatened to veto it.
Well, why not make him veto it?
Why not make the senators vote on it?
The Republicans in the House still have not passed that out of committee.
It was rejected for sort of the giant voice vote that happens where by popular consent, you're just allowed to push the bill forward.
Doesn't mean Republicans can't do it.
They can.
A little bit of smart politics here would go a long way.
Because again, Joe Biden is incredibly vulnerable.
In just one second, we're going to get to the Republican side of the aisle, what it means that Donald Trump was able to win almost 70% of the vote in the Michigan primary against Nikki Haley.
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